Category Archives: Enterprise Applications

Joe Roushar – August 2016 I have often heard COOs and CIOs lament the fact that systems need to be replaced too frequently because they tend to be brittle and costly to adapt. Yet changes in the marketplace and regulations force companies to update automation capabilities, often requiring rapid change. Mergers and acquisitions compound the problem […]

Joe Roushar – June 2016 Is knowledge important to you or your organization? What value does it bring? Are there types of knowledge that are more valuable than others? Do you know where your knowledge is right now, and what it’s doing? Business Knowledge comes in multiple flavors. Business Information systems are used to process data or […]

Joe Roushar – October 2015 Quantitative data is easy to make into useful information by establishing correct associations and providing human experts with the right slicing and dicing tools. But in its native format, data is not independently meaningful. Many qualitative content sources are narrative, born as whole information. Such content is advanced beyond data because of the built-in associations, but inevitably […]

Joe Roushar – August 2015 Knowledge workers in all types of organizations need information in internal (to the organization) databases, intranet sites and documents, as well as information in external databases, web pages and documents. The promise of data convergence includes the lofty goal of providing, from a single request, structured and unstructured information from both internal […]

A Parallel Expert I once rode the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Ulan-Batar, Mongolia (not the picture at right – the engines were diesel). Several times along the journey we passed slower trains, and we were passed by faster ones. When people and freight are confined to a single lane, the speed of the slowest defines the speed of […]

The information lifecycle is like a game of telephone – by the time a message gets to the end of the line it is often radically different than it was in the beginning. But this is usually OK because business information is not a game, and there are well-defined processes that bring about each transformation in the […]

The wave is coming. I spent some quality time last summer in a large consumer products manufacturer in Cincinnati helping architect semantic capabilities to automate tasks in chemical compliance for selling a large number of products in dozens of countries, each with hundreds of rules that apply to thousands of chemicals constituents. You can imagine the combinatorial explosion. […]

In Section 5 we discussed different kinds of knowledge, including existential or hierarchical knowledge and causal knowledge. In Section 7 we discussed modeling approaches and search techniques that could be applied to any kind of knowledge. We saw that causal knowledge can be modeled as chains of causes and effects, and that existential knowledge can be […]

One of the beautiful things about the human brain is it’s adaptability: people can “change” their minds at the last minute based on the changing situation (context). This is not trivial, but I believe that it is one of the characteristics of human cognition that is relatively straightforward to mimic in computer programs and apps. In […]

Translation as A Sample Domain For our sample domain, we need something that requires expertise, is not trivial, and about which the author knows something. This limits us significantly, so we are taking the easy way out and going with the domain of Machine Translation (MT) of human languages. We considered the intricacies of communication […]